June 08, 2015

After many years of following and taking part in discussions, plans, and projects for sustainable cities, I find myself yearning for some focused, long-term thinking about where the stable endpoint for our cities really lies. While I see much work towards incremental improvements in resource consumption, green-house gas emissions, and reduction or re-cycling of waste, I cannot help thinking that these improvements are at best marginal. While I read and hear much about laudable goals at the city, regional, and national levels, I cannot help feeling that they resemble planning a manned flight to Mars without actually knowing how far away that is. What I am confident about is that driving electric cars and replacing incandescent light bulbs with LEDs are not going to solve the problems of this civilization over the coming century.

I know directly of only two people who have stopped to wonder what the likely endpoints of these sustainability initiatives are likely to be. One is David Owen, a journalist with the New York Times, who has written thoughtfully in "The Green Metropolis" about what it would take for the United States to approach long-term sustainability. The other is David Good at the University of Cambridge, a psychologist, whose prescription for sustainable living runs somewhat as follows:

Stop flying

Eat meat only once per week

Eat local food

Consume only 70 l / day of fresh water

Occupy only 30 m2 of residential space

Consume only 2000 W of power

Drive a car that weighs no more than the passengers

But even these views consider only individual consumption. Individual consumption is certainly important, but it is merely one of the more visible aspects of the complex systems that make up our civilization. We cannot, at scale and for long periods, adopt behaviours that are significantly different from local norms unless we also change other aspects of our civilisation's many local and global systems. So what I am searching for is thinking on what adjacent and reachable operating points are possible for these global systems are conceivable, would offer long-term sustainability over centuries if not millennia, and can be reached over the coming century with the minimum of suffering on all sides, though this may be far greater than we would wish.

I am also fairly convinced that we will not, collectively, break our addiction to consuming energy. The history of our civilizations going back many millennia shows a steady growth in the use of various sources of energy to supplement our physical strengths. Economists shudder even at the thought of reducing our energy consumption. We may however succeed in this century in weaning ourselves from the use of fossil fuels, a primary source of greenhouse gas emissions.

Similarly I find it hard to imagine that we will dispense with cars in some form. Individual, on-demand mobility is another powerful addiction that will continue to shape our cities. But I am slightly optimistic that we may be able to separate satisfying that addiction from the actual ownership of cars that have duty cycles of less than 10% and spend the rest of their lives cluttering up our streets.

But these approaches may be the tail of the challenge, rather than the dog. For better or worse, we are a techno-centric civilisation. Faced with a challenge our impulse is to look first for a technical solution - green energy, desalinization, self-driving cars. There is some sense in this. Things that get invented and become commercially successful are created and sustained because they enable us to satisfy some powerful desire. Desire, if not necessity, is the mother of invention. But as with any addiction, these technologies return the favour and lead to a re-invention of our lives, our societies, and our civilisation. They change the structures of our cities, our industries, and our environments. The structure of our civilisation is strongly related to our technologies and so to some degree we should be looking to technology for solutions.

But I believe that the dog does nevertheless wag the tail. Meaning that at root, change will need to come from how we live as individuals and societies, what we value and desire, and how we satisfy those desires. These are harder to change than technology. Nor is it easy to decide in what direction to change. Sustainability is full of paradoxes. For example it is argued that the British should rather consume lamb reared in New Zealand and transported half way around the world, rather than lamb reared no more than a couple of hundred kilometers away in Wales or Scotland. So what changes should we be aiming for over the coming century and how will such changes be produced?

Our civilisation is a global system of systems, the most complex set of systems constructed by humankind, and it touches the lives of all but a very few isolated communities. We think of it as modern and as the most highly developed civilisation the world has known, but we should not think of it, or of ourselves, as the ultimate end point. As Jared Diamond describes in Collapse, there are many earlier civilizations that collapsed after hundreds or even thousands of years. Moreover many of its component systems, such as communities and cities, systems of justice, or the expression of knowledge through arts and rituals, have origins going back many millennia. Systems of that age are evidently very resilient and have survived many challenges. What we experience today is the current survivor, a survivor that has achieved dominance through both the conquest and the absorption of many regional civilisations. We may hope that through absorption it has achieved a highly diverse "gene pool" that increases its resilience to the challenges that lie ahead.

Resilience here implies a system of systems that can accommodate quite large changes in its sub-systems - environmental, social, political, economic, technological - by shifting to new operating points, that is anthropological niches. Resilient civilisations are able to make successful transitions to new operating points that can sustain a roughly equal or an expanded population. From an admittedly Western perspective, recent examples of events that have lead to such changes include the last Ice Age, the Dark Ages, the Black Death, the "discovery" of the Americas, the Thirty Years' War, the Industrial Revolution, the 19th century's political revolutions, the 20th century's World Wars, and the early 21st century's globalization. Note that these changes are both regressive - the Black Death - and progressive - the Industrial Revolution, reflecting on the one hand the decline or collapse of a major pillar of civilisation or on the other hand the emergence of a new pillar.

But resilience also means that - up to some tipping point - a given operating point is highly stable and hence difficult to change. I believe that we value stability even more highly than wealth, peace, democracy, or justice, not to mention the environment. Transitions between operating points are often extremely costly in terms of lives, political power, and wealth. Civilisations would not endure for thousands or even hundreds of years if they were constantly adapting to new operating point points.

Hence it is my view that the reform of our present civilisation will not occur through the well-intentioned, but marginal, efforts of those of us who recycle. It seems more likely to occur as a result of powerful forces beyond the control of individuals or nations. Indeed it is hard to think of a major change that was produced solely through good intentions. The intention to abolish slavery in Europe and the Americas can be traced back to 1542. But real emancipation did not begin until Britain passed the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 and the United States passed the 13th Amendment to the Constitution and the advent of steam power and mechanisation may have been the proximate cause. Likewise, the progress of women's suffrage owed much to the need for women in workforces during the Second World War. Successful systems are very hard to change.

So my question in systems terms becomes: What adjacent or nearby operating points could exist, which could be the most attractive, and what would be the costs (humanitarian, social, environmental, economic, political....) of reaching them? Which, if any of them, could sustainability support a system of systems that meets David Owen's or David Good's prescriptions?

To say that these are difficult questions is an understatement, but we are making progress towards being able to tackle such questions. Initiatives such as the Global Systems Science initiative are bringing together researchers across relevant disciplines (economics, finance, climate, energy, urbanisation...) who are able to apply new sources of information and new analytical techniques to enable us to understand where we are today. From these insights we may hope to progress to studies of alternative global systems. In a more practical approach, The Ecological Sequestration Trust (TEST), lead by Peter Head, is attempting real-world experiments on how to facilitate transitions in several cities from high-Carbon to low-Carbon economies.

By the end of the 21st century, it seems quite likely that forces already at work today will have produced a significantly different world:

Climate change leading to disruptions in agriculture, resulting in disruptions to supplies of food and political instabilities related to water, access to arable land and fish supplies, leading in turn to large-scale migration.

Instabilities in the global financial systems leading to recurrent economic crises.

Volatility in the global supplies of minerals leading to political and economic instabilities.

Inequities in the sharing of wealth in developed and developing economies, leading to social unrest and political instabilities.

Instabilities in developed economies due to ageing populations leading to unsupportable retirement benefits, social and medical services, and the inability to maintain investment in productive infrastructure and education.

Under-employment as automation takes over ever broader swaths of occupations leading to social and political unrest.

Under these and other, as yet unknown, forces, 22nd century civilisation will be different from today. We will move from A to B, but where might B lie and what choices exist for the route?

A number of thoughtful groups, such as TEST or the IPCC, are proposing voluntary or conscious changes to our civilisation that seek to mitigate or adapt to such forces. My own, reliable prediction about the future is that it will be different from the present and therefore I do not believe that we should be seeking to preserve today's status quo, which is but one, brief resting point along the evolution of our civilisation. I am not suggesting that we can today predict the actual impacts that these forces might produce. Instead I suggest that we begin large-scale global research projects like GSS and TEST that will over a few decades enable us to make such predictions.

Our ability to develop understanding and predictive abilities of such massive problems as been growing strongly in the last decades. When I grew up in the North of England in the 1950s and 1960s, our weather forecasting was based on ships stationed in the Channel, the North Sea, the Atlantic, and the Irish Sea. These ships would report their local conditions daily via radio and based on this limited information the UK Met Office would attempt to forecast the next day's weather. My father, an intelligent man, still believed that the weather was whatever God chose to send and lay beyond human prediction. Certainly climatology and atmospheric science were fairly primitive, lacking in both sufficient meteorological data and verifiable theories. But in the 1960s the supply of data increased dramatically from satellite images, high-altitude aircraft, radar, and the deployment of terrestrial weather stations. At the same time computing power began its exponential growth allowing the flood of data to test and validate theories of the atmosphere and climate and so began a virtuous circle that today provides useful weather forecasts up to several days in advance.

While the weather and climate are extremely complex systems, they are at least grounded in thermodynamics, a hard science. When it comes to the social sciences (anthropology, economics, politics, sociology...) we are on much less firm ground. But through the combination of rapidly expanding Big Data and the development of cognitive computing, virtuous circles are beginning to appear in many areas of these sciences. Equally our ability to observe what is going, for example by using satellite images to monitor conflicts, displaced populations, industrial pollution or individual consumption, offers new tools for inducing or forcing behavioural change.

While the preceding centuries have manifested economic, social, and political changes at the scale of nations or regions, in the 21st century we seem highly likely to face large-scale challenges at the global level. Finally everything is connected to everything else. We may therefore need to hope, among other hopes, that we will have time to assess adjacent and reachable operating points for our civilisation and to at least aim to avoid the worst among these possibilities. Time to begin work!

February 25, 2013

My fascination with photography goes back almost 60 years. At the age of six I received a plastic-bodied Kodak Brownie on the occasion of my sister's wedding. Since then photography has been a recurring passion for both my technical and pictorial interests.

In September 2008 I spent a week in Nova Scotia with Freeman Patterson, the elder statesman of Canadian nature photographers. Freeman had originally studied divinity at Columbia University and was therefore well educated in psychology. One of the most insightfull thoughts he gave us related to his own experience of noticing a recurrent pattern in some of the images he made and realizing that it represented an internal struggle he was facing. He concluded that such patterns reflect some personal issue, often subconciously, and that the subconcious is attuned to external images that echo such issues.

Reflecting on this thought, I recalled a number of recurring patterns in my own images over the last 10 years: lone trees, views throught the doors or windows of darkened rooms, and reflections, often abstract reflections, in pools and flowing water. Blue Reflections (above) is one of the best examples of such images and although it is almost entirely abstract, it has always provoked a strong reaction, ever since I caught it. Although it violates all the "rules" of good composition, it holds my eye wonderfully.

So I was particularly pleased with the comment of Joshua Chuang, the juror of this show, that he too experienced a strong emotional reaction to this image. I would be hard pressed to provide a rational explanation for my fascination with these images of reflections - of which now there are a number of series. I find comfort in Freeman Patterson's suggestion that what we choose to capture in the camera is sometimes neither random nor rational, but instead is decided in part by the subconcious mind.

Long ago I learned the trick of throwing questions and problems into my subconcious and then returning some time later to learn what it has done with them. Usually I am asking it for words for a talk or a piece of writing and it replies with a narrative or some other text that answers my need. But here we see that sometimes its answer is to draw my attention to scenes that I should capture.

Sometimes I feel that I have a third eye. There are moments when I get a sudden signal that says "There's a picture in there", even before I have taken in the scene. I simply know that now or later I have to stop and look for this picture. A recent example was a short bus ride I took from a car park in Danbury to the campus of the Western Connecticut State University for an address by the Dalai Lama. At a certain moment I glanced out of the window of the bus and for literally one second I saw the entrance to an old cemetary. It was October and the oaks and beeches were brilliant with colour. But even before I noticed the trees, I knew that there was a picture in there somewhere.

What we photograph is usually rationally sought out. But once in a while the unconcious speaks through our eyes and then we find images that connect deeply with our emotions.

November 19, 2011

<This is an English rendering of a talk I gave on November 18, 2011 at the Paris 2030 Colloquium.>

As you might imagine, I will talk about urban information networks. Such networks have existed since the beginnings of cities; indeed they are one of the basic reasons for the existence of citiy: to enable the sharing of information among the inhabitants so that they may learn from one another. This is the same principle that enables millions of termites to federate their little intelligences and thereby create such amazing structures. Information networks are thus a basic element of life in a city. I am not thinking here of social networks, which deal with personal information, but rather of information concerning the how the city works, both in demand and supply of services.

Historically much of this information was hidden and circulated only among a small, spatially-limited group of people. It was in forms that did not easily permit wider transmission, integration with other information or mathematical analysis. But today more and more of such information is available in digital form that does enable easy transmission, integration, and analysis. So now we can begin to ask questions about the immediate needs of individual inhabitants and about the problems they face in exploiting the city's services. Equally we can ask questions about the real-time performance of the city's services, their immediate capacities and the operational problems that exist.

I will talk about three themes in this space: number one, The Invisible Rendered Visisble, number two, Information for Resource Management, and number three, OpenData 2.0.

On my first theme, I have already indicated the role that digital systems play in making information more widely and immediately visible. This is central to enabling the inhabitants to benefit easily from the services and resources of the city. It is also central to enabling city managers to make the best use of the capacities and resources that are immediately available. A recurring problem we encounter in urban system management is that decisions are made based on information that is minimal or incomplete or stale.

A common example is the sharing of water among multiple cities within a single water basin. Local city or utility water managers generally have no current information about how much water is available upstream in the system and about how much water their neighbours are drawing from it. As a result, they will sometimes withdraw too much water, resulting in environmental problems or they will draw less water than they could, resulting in local supply limits or, in exceptional cases, increased risk of flooding.

An example of how information enables the inhabitants to most effectively use the immediately available capacity of the total, multi-modal transportation system comes from our work with CalTrans in the San Francisco bay area. Here inhabitants with smart mobile telephones can subscribe to a service that enables CalTrans to observe their journeys based on the GPS reading from the telephone. From these observations CalTrans can determine the individual user's common journeys. When the system sees the user beginning a familiar journey, for example commuting from home to the workplace, it looks at the multi-modal choices available to the traveller and the operational status of each of those systems along the required paths, and then makes a recommendation to the traveller for the optimal way to make this journey at this time. The traveller thus makes the journey with the minimum delays and disruptions and the transportation systems' loads can be balanced.

On my second theme, I am thinking of a project in which I am slightly involved in Zurich, where the technical university, the ETH, has developed a set of principles based on One Planet Living (OPL). OPL seeks to define and encourage the adoption of a set of resource consumptions that will enable 9 billion people to fairly share the resources - water, food, energy, land - of the one planet we have available. For energy, this results in an annual consumption of 2,000 kW-hours per person, or an average of roughly 250 Watts per person. This goal has been adopted for an eco-district development in Zurich. Achieving such a goal requires that the individual is aware of his or her own energy consumption, just as modern cars give us feedback on fuel consumption, and also careful management of the balance between demand and various sources of electrical energy.

If we now think of individual consumptions in existing cities, how close is each individual to this goal? The question in most cases is unanswerable, because such information is not available unless the city or the utility has installed smart meters to measure consumption of electricty and water. This is a basic principle from Management Science - if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it.

Another example of waste resulting from a lack of information comes from the construction industry. A large city such as New York has of the order of a million buildings. Since a building - depending on its purpose and how it was built and maintained - has a lifetime of 50 to 100 years, it follows that on average in New York some 10-20,000 buildings are torn down and re-built every year. Imagine how much that represents in thousands of tons of old materials that are carted away and dumped at some growing distance in a landfill or in the ocean and in new materials that have to be created and transported to the building site. How many hundreds of thousands of truck journeys on already crowded streets!

For the 2012 Summer Olympics in east London a different approach was adopted. When the London Olympic Committee issued a contract for the preparation of the site for the Olympic village, it contained a requirement that 90% of the materials in the existing buildings should be re-used. The management of this work went to an American engineering consultancy, CH2M Hill. CH2 hired 2,000 unemployed people in east London, taught them construction Health and Safety and how to deconstruct the existing buildings. Bricks and stone were cleaned up and prepared for use in the new construction. Steel was shipped to China - at a peak of 300 tons per day - to be recycled. Wood and other combustible materials were converted to energy.

The result was cheaper - CH2 completed the project on time and well under budget - than dumping the old materials and buying new and resulted in 94% of the old materials being re-used as well as a further 4% being used to produce energy. Why could not New York implement such a system? Because today there is no information available on supply and demand of such materials and hence no market for them. A lack of information again leads to waste.

On my third theme I point to the future of exploitation of urban systems information. You are no doubt familiar with the OpenData Movement, which is growing rapdily in popularity. OpenData 1.0, as I call it, begins with publishing documents - government reports including eventually management reports on urban systems operational performance. This is hugely valuable in developing transparency between government and citizens, something that is greatly lacking today in most cities.

But an equally valuable step will come when cities begin to expose their operational information in near real-time by allowing it to be federated into private services. The city in fact is the largest producer of information about what is going on, but today that information remains trapped inside the many agencies. By publishing it, as the government of Singapore is doing and others - such as Dublink in Dublin, Ireland - are following, that information is available to be tapped by the innovative capabilities of citizens and enterprises. While I strongly commend CalTrans' leadership in the example mentioned above, why should travellers depend on government to provide multi-modal transportation guidance? Why not allow innovators to compete for the most effective algorithms to optimise such systems? There are certainly some urban systems that are critical and whose operation should be reserved to the local government, such as water management, but in many other areas private enterprise is likely to be a more powerful source of innovation than public agencies. This is what I think of as OpenData 2.0.

I have written elsewhere of this approach - government as an agent for capturing and publishing real-time information about urban systems operations - as the Stupid City, a term that refers back to the Internet principle of putting intelligence around the periphery of the network, rather than in the center as was traditional in the telephone network.

So these are my three thoughts for today on the importance of the flows of operational information in cities and the enormous impacts that can be achieved when these flows become digital. This is a new way of looking at how cities work, a new way of helping the inhabitants to get the best use of the city's services, and a new way of engaging citizens and enterprises in making the city a better place to live and work.

November 08, 2011

In 1780 97% of the US population worked on some aspect of agriculture. Today only 3% of the US population works in the agriculture. In large part this is because of productivity improvements in agriculture, but it also reflects enormous changes in the last 230 years in what people can get paid for doing and what they in turn will pay money for.

The movement away from agriculture and towards increased urban living began with industrialization and the need for workers with a basic education to operate the new machines in the mills and factories. As industrialization became more developed, new demand appeared for highly skilled workers such as mechanics, technicians, engineers, designers, and researchers. US agricultural employment declined to 50% by 1870.

In parallel with the evolution of work, came the evolution of consumer products. The price of food declined with increasing productivity in agriculture and wages for the new, higher skills rose, creating new disposable income. In 1780 it would have been astonishing to find a clock in the home of a farm labourer or even in the home of a factory worker in 1820. Not only were clocks fragile, expensive objects, but such workers had no great need to know the time with greater precision than the local church clock or the neighbourhood factory klaxon. Yet by the end of the 19th century, clock and watch making were major industries, including here in Brooklyn. Emerging techniques of mass production and Taylorism made cheap, reasonably accurate clocks affordable and urban living created a greater need for accurate knowledge of the time – for catching a train or a bus to work or, increasingly, for getting to entertainment on time. And so began the enormous expansion of the consumer economy in the 20th century.

In the last 10-15 years we have seen another remarkable evolution of this model: a marketplace for information. Many new technical and creative jobs have emerged since 1995 in the development, publication, distribution, aggregation, and analysis of information about goods, services, and opinions on the Internet and the Web. In the last 10 years we have seen an explosion of information on the Web about people and this is now a fertile area for services to analyse and deduce insights about individuals and collections of people and to re-use this information to help these people satisfy their thirsts for even more information. The monster feeds on itself.

I sometimes show students the information that existed about me when I was their age: a paper birth certificate, a paper drivers licence, a paper bank book, and a paper passbook. That – together with my educational record – was the sum total of what the world knew about Colin Harrison in 1965 and hardly anyone was aware of it. Total, no self-respecting student would have less than some tens of Megabytes on the Web and many will have many time more…..and hundreds of millions of people are willing to pay to see it. Who would have thought?

So the generations now entering the workforce – Gen Y and Gen Z – bring a very different perspective on the world to my generation. These people were “born on the Web” and have never known a world that was not rich, incredibly rich, with information. This will have big repercussions for cities.

From economists like Richard Florida and Ed Glaiser, we learn that this generation is seeking out dense urban environments for living and working. The virtual world of the Web strengthens their need for physical proximity, whereas in 1997 we feared that it would cause cities to disappear and be replaced by a global village.

In Dublin two weeks ago I learned that German car manufacturers are worried because these generations have a low level of interest in cars. Cars were important to my generation because they offered us mobility in our low-density environments and because they were one of the leading technologies of those days. But in a high-density environment, cars are inefficient, leading to congestion and the endless search for a parking place. So with a return to high-density living comes a return to walking and to public transportation.

These generations have another challenging expectation: No paper. When did they last write a letter? When did you last even see one of them holding a pen? No, their interface to the non-immediate world is digital and that extends to government services. Replace forms with Web sites, replace tickets with RFID, replace going to the service office of a particular agency with an integrated view of all public services.

But this is transactional. What about content? How does content flow between the citizen and the city? Does the city want to hear from its citizens? Does it know what to do with this information? Can it demonstrate that it has paid attention and responded? How does the city want to express itself to its citizens in real-time – informing them about how things are going, providing the material for analysis and insight development on the best combination of bus, train and walking to get home tonight or the safest way to walk to school tomorrow morning?

This is how the city becomes smart. By integrating itself into the bit streams of its younger citizens and the new enterprises they are developing. By breaking down the fortress wall between how and how well the city is providing services, so that these coming generations can live as Internet natives.

Some cities can do this and others will not. New York City is trying very hard, witness the forthcoming Big Apps competition, sponsored by Mayor Bloomberg. Now cities will compete on the Apps that people use to run their lives. Systems Science tells us that as cities grow in population innovation rises, wages rise, energy consumption per capita declines, and people walk more quickly. But history tells us that growth does not continue for ever. At some point the model collapses, witness New York in 1974 with the collapse of the garment industry, Detroit in 2008 with the collapse of the car industry. The city will survive if it can re-invent itself. Today New York is trying to re-invent itself to become less dependent on the declining financial service industries and to develop a new high-tech economy.

So I have a confident prediction: the future will be different from today. New forms of employment will emerge, new forms of goods and services will emerge. Our lives will be different. I come back to a saying of a retired senior Vice President of Technology at IBM, Nick Donofrio, the son of an immigrant Italian family. When Nick would complain about the world, his father would tell him: “If nothing changes, nothing changes. If nothing changes, nothing changes.” If we want the world to be better in some way, it will also be different.

July 15, 2010

During the 1980s the telecommunications industry developed an architecture and services that were branded as the "Intelligent Network". The Intelligent Network was based on a series of standards issued by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and grew from the widespread deployment of digital switches controlled by Unix-based computers. These standards enabled such services as 800 and 900 numbers, re-dialing, call-back, and voicemail, but prevented any possibility of new services being offered from outside the network. Those of you of a certain age may recall that it was only in 1974, following an FCC ruling, that AT&T finally agreed to allow any device, e.g. a telephone, other than its own products to be connected to its network.

Beginning around 1993 the Internet began to emerge in public consciousness and demonstrated exponential scaling of the numbers of hosts (although exponential scaling from a small base had been a characteristic since the earliest days of the Internet). The telecommunications industry provided the backbone links (T1 and T3 lines in the early days), but at the same time the industry scoffed at the notion of a large-scale network without central management. There were frequent predictions of imminent "meltdown" (which has never occurred). By 1997 it was hard to argue that the Internet could not scale and David Isenberg, an employee at AT&T Labs, published a white paper entitled "Rise of the Stupid Network". This article contrasted the core assumption of the Intelligent Network, namely a centralized intelligence supporting dumb terminals at the periphery, with the highly distributed approach of the Internet. In the Internet the network is (in a certain sense) "stupid" and the intelligence, including the transport protocol management, is provided by intelligent hosts or terminals at the periphery. This has enabled amazing innovation in the creation of services that can be delivered over the stupid Internet. I believe that David Isenberg's subsequent career at AT&T Labs was short, although thanks to the same Internet AT&T was unable to prevent the dissemination of his article.

Since 1997 the industry has considerably transformed, initially adopting IP telephony on international and later domestic long-distance links, while at the same time attempting to block the use of IP telephony end-to-end. Switches have also evolved until a telephone exchange is almost indistinguishable from an Internet routing center. But the commitment to centrally managed communications remains, even as hand-held devices now rival switch controllers in computing power.

We are now developing another set of large-scale network-based services, Smarter Cities, in which it seems perfectly logical to connect millions of sensors via networks to a centralized intelligence for the purpose of extracting insight from this flood of information. But some of us are agitating for transparency in access to municipal and local government information. We are encouraging cities and regions to think of their citizens as active and intelligent participants in these systems and not merely the dumb recipients of centralized decision-making. We are wondering what kinds of innovative, external services could be created by this kind of openness. What will happen if we view the Smarter city, not as a centralized facility for analyzing real-world data, but as a set of cleansed and labelled flows of information, together with reference and historical databases, that anyone (modulo privacy and security issues) could access - what innovation would this unleash? Could the citizens manage municipal services better - and more cheaply - than the local government agencies? Are we missing an important lesson here? It may not be a stupid thought.

March 30, 2010

In the Smarter X frenzy of 2009, it was very easy to skip over the word "Smarter" and not wonder exactly what it was doing there. Thinking about this late last year, I realized that we can in fact define a "Smart Principle" that assigns a very specific meaning to the work in this context.

Let's start with an example. I am going to pick Road-Usage Charging (RUC) as an example of a Smart solution, but in fact there are many solutions that exhibit the principle I am going to describe. Here are some easy steps:

RUC systems are deployed to automate the collection of tolls for road segments, bridges, tunnels, and so forth. Local government like them because they are often sources of new revenue at relatively low cost. The business cases for these systems have very high ROI and the investment is often recovered in less than one year.

RUC systems are relatively simple as IT systems. The basic challenge is to recognize vehicles as they pass through or under a gate. This can be based on an RFID device, e.g. the EZPass system on the east coast of the United States, or on license plate recognition, e.g. City of Stockholm, or a combination of the two, e.g. Singapore. This identification is mapped to an account and a charge transaction is made to the account. Not too difficult in principle.

However, what we have also created here is a stream of high resolution data on the movement of vehicles past well-defined locations in an urban area. Hundreds of thousands of touch points per day being generated free and mainly regarded as a kind of waste product from the business purpose of generating transactional charges.

But there in information in that data and in 2007, the Singapore Land Transport Agency (LTA), which was an early adopter of RUC, asked IBM if that data could be used to predict incipient congestion in districts within the city. The mathematicians in IBM Research started looking at the data and although it did not provide complete coverage of the city, they were able to detect patterns of traffic density that are leading indicators for the onset of congestion. In fact, they were able to build predict models that with high accuracy give the city LTA as much as one hour of warning of the danger of congestion. An hour is sufficient time for the LTA traffic managers to change the timing of the traffic lights or to change the tolling for specific roads. The latter is a unique feature of the Singapore RUC.

So here is the Smart Principle: 1) A system is deployed, often for transactional purposes. 2) A free by-product of the system is a dense stream of data about some aspect of the real-world. 3) This stream of data contains information about critical insights on what is going on in the real-world that can be extracted, in "real-time", by applying online analytical processing. 4) These insights enable the city managers to take better decisions about how to manage the operation of the city's infrastructure.

RUCs are a great example, but in fact there are many such systems for energy, transportation, buildings, public safety and many other areas of city management. This accumulation of such systems in many cities over recent years creates what I call the Urban Digital Foundation - that sea of data, free data, that we can now tap for a very broad understanding of how to build a Smarter City. This is not to say that we never need to install new sensors. Water in particular is a domain that is strongly under-instrumented.

See this IBM video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfEbMV295Kk) that describes a Smarter Planet view of the Internet of Things and illustrates this beautifully.

The absence of this Urban Digital Foundation is what differentiates a potential Smarter City from others. In part it has to do with a rich communications infrastructure, but it largely has to do with the creation of these cost-free streams of data. When people challenge me sometime to suggest what we could do to help some of the sprawling mega-cities such as Calcutta, my response is that there is little we can do until this Urban Digital Foundation is established. Without data there is no Smarter City.

February 07, 2010

In the interest of full disclosure, I hereby declare that I am an engineer and also highly right-brained.

My wife has often accused me of living too much in my head and she is, of course, right. It's a beautiful landscape in here, as filled with lively ideas as an Alpine meadow is filled with June flowers. So many ideas, each one unique, that I will never have time to express them all, certainly not if the current rate of progress on this blog is maintained.

Many of these ideas are related to my work, to my family and friends, to my activities, places I have been and things I have seen. Sometimes it is so wild in here that I can neither concentrate nor sleep. Engineers are problem solvers and I am often working through some difficult issues, picking and discarding ideas that fit together until I have a solution that works.

So my wife is right, as wives always are, in a certain sense, namely that the presence of my body is no guarantee of my attention. But she is also right in a more general sense, that as a society we spend too much time in this part of our heads. Our Western educational system tries to get us to think, to apply the principles or rules of mathematics, of English grammar, of accounting, and so forth and certainly that is a hard enough challenge. But this is only the most accessible part of our minds, the conscious, deliberate application of our engines of logic and imagination. It fails to tap those depths of unconscious thought that grind away on who knows what principles of logic and imagination. As beautiful as this conscious landscape is, I am only seeing the tip of the iceberg.

I was fortunate last September to take course in photography from Freeman Patterson in New Brunswick, Canada. Freeman is not only a wonderful photographer, but he is also a wise man, drawing on a considerable number of decades of an interesting life and a grounding in divinity. He helped me to understand that the photographs we choose to take are in part guided by principles of aesthetics and what is technically possible, but that our choices are also driven by some subconscious need. He cited a period when - without being aware of it - he was obsessed with photographs that had circular features. He told how a wise friend had observed this, commented on it, and helped him to understand that it was a reflection of a need or a problem in his life. It made me realize that there are such repetitions in my own choices of scenes - dark interiors looking out into sunfilled landscapes, stands of trees where the point of interest is deep in the background and often more brightly sunlit than the foreground.

A couple of months ago I began writing a short story. There was no particular reason for starting this and I certainly had plenty of other things to do. But an idea had come to me, slipping in to my consciousness while I was not watching, as it has many times in the past, and I felt and still feel compelled to work on it.

I have written novels and stories for many years. Novel and stories are very different. A novel is a journey whose destination is unknown at the moment of departure; it evolves through the process of writing. Characters do things that the author had never intended. Whereas a story is something I can think through as I begin. It is like doing a jigsaw puzzle, where one begin with the corner pieces, the edges, the major features in the centre, and finally the broader spaces.

This one began with its ending and quickly showed where the beginning lay. It is in fact a story about a story. Story no. 2 is a life story and story no. 1 is a set of views on that life story. Story no.2 is a pastiche of people and places I have known and a thread of invention that joins them together. After some weeks I realized that story no. 1 is about me, specifically about a problem or possibly problems that I am struggling with in my own life. Unconscious thought gave me these ideas as a way of expressing my own struggle.

I suppose that this is what psychoanalysis tries to do. But how much richer the world would be if we were educated to develop such forms of expression. Not necessarily richer in terms of GDP, although that is ultimately a matter of choice, but richer in terms of how understand ourselves and how we can express to others what is going on in our lives.

Art is not only about learning craftsmanship in drawing or keyboard playing or singing or weaving. It is a channel for those unconscious thoughts, thoughts that - whether we are aware of it or not - guide our lives. By focusing our education exclusively on conscious thought, we impoverish our children, robbing them of a major portion of their humanity. Shouldn't we be teaching arts to our children?

January 22, 2010

I am visiting Dubai again on business and staying in a hotel on Jumeirah Beach, one of the resort districts. It is Friday evening, one of the main party evenings of Dubai's weekend. Down below in the street (The Walk) are sidewalk cafes and bars, on the beach is a large volleyball stadium (rather deserted) and the thump of Arabian rock fills the warm air.

In many ways I have no affection for Dubai. It is an artificial, urban creation on sand at the edge of the Persian Gulf. Whenever I am here I long for the hills and swamps of rural Connecticut and the mountains and torrents of the Swiss Alps. Somewhat scathingly I have observed that the main recreations in Dubai are shopping and eating.

This is a pleasant time of the year for the weather - temperatures reach around 28C (80F) so at least one can be outside, unlike the summer when temperatures reach 48C (120F) and no one wants to be outside air conditioning for more than a couple of minutes. Coming in next week is the annual Dubai Shopping Festival, which features "January sales" in the excessive numbers of shopping malls - though also a lot of great entertainment. I often think of Dubai as the Gulf version of Las Vegas and indeed I am told that if you know the right places, there is a lot of hanky panky going on here. Lastly there is the "Dubai attitude", somewhat muted today by the financial crisis, but still a macho attitude to build the biggest, wildest real estate on the planet. The Burj Khalifa opened three weeks ago and recently I have seen architect's plans and models for even greater excess.

So in many ways I am not fond of Dubai, as I am found for example of Zurich. And yet, that noise penetrating my hotel room from the street below is full of life. Not everyone can live in Connecticut or Switzerland and many must live in arid, environmentally sterile lands. Yet, even here there is life. There is the energy of life, that inspiration to move on, to do more, to live more, and to love more. If there cannot be trees and lakes here, at least there can be exciting architecture.

I am not yet old - so I think at least - but there are many years behind me. At a conference yesterday a journalist praised me for my "philosophical attitude" to sustainability. Looking forward, time is clearly limited. So perhaps this is why in recent weeks I have been feeling unusually in love with life. Samuel Johnson observed that "Nothing focuses the mind like a hanging" and while death is not imminent, the finiteness and finality of life is raising my awareness of its richness. The need to celebrate, the need to tell the people I love what they mean to me. The simple, but exquisite pleasure of being in the presence of people I love.

So although I would never hope to live in Dubai, I am encouraged to see and hear that life is being lived here with all the passion it deserves.

January 22, 2009

“How do you expect
to earn money if none of you actually produces anything?”

Douglas Adams' immortal expression of exasperation with a group
of middle managers and telephone sanitizers rings much in my mind in recent
months.As an engineer I have long been
suspicious of MBAs and the financial crisis completely confirms this – wealth
is created by producing products and services that actually bring tangible benefit to
clients, not through magic tricks with other people’s money.

But for all we are inclined to despise bankers (and I am in
no way opposed to this), even these Masters of the Universe could not create the
present financial crisis alone.I
believe that they needed the cooperation of real producers of value and also of
People Like Us.

I trace the origins of this downfall to the emergence during
the 1980s of the Master of Business Administration) (MBA) degree as a recognized and
desirable academic qualification.It’s
something like a degree in hairdressing, but admittedly a lot of hard work, so
as to select for the brightest or at least the most committed.And
these bright young things were unleashed on the world with their alma mater’s
certification of their Master of the Universe status, fully capable of managing
any business by the numbers.

Results were quick to emerge, as we saw in the wave of
“re-engineering” (a.k.a. downsizing) that flowed in the early 1990s.And now a whole generation later, management
of a business by the numbers is firmly entrenched.It reminds me though of the response of the
owner of a Yorkshire wool mill when his accountant
(remember when we called them accountants?) had the temerity to speak up during
a board meeting: “Shurrup, tha nobbut scorekeeper!”Those were the days!

This philosophy put publicly listed companies at the mercy
of the stock analysts and forced business leaders who should have known better
to focus their energies on quarter by quarter improvements in bottom line
profitability, forgetting their actual reason for being in business.

The benefits of this flowed to stockholders at the expense
of employees (although they might also have been stockholders).There is a clear trend over the last twenty
years showing that salaries have failed to keep track of growing profits.

So what does a consumer do when there is no prospect of a
significant salary increase?Well we turned to alternative Weapons of Mass Financing.The warning sign of this for me came when I saw ordinary people leasing
rather than buying cars.This is clearly
a financial trick to enable average people to buy upmarket transportation.Then Home Equity Loans were invented to tap
into accrued but unrealized equity in our homes and that was the beginning of
the slippery slope.It’s a straight and
very fast path from there to Sub-Prime Mortgages.

And by then even the Masters of the Universe could no longer
control the monster they had created. So I look forward as we eventually emerge from this crisis to a refocusing on businesses that actually create useful products and services. For example, engineering.

July 31, 2008

In the novel Fahrenheit 451Ray Bradbury pictured a
society in which mass entertainment had destroyed individual interest in
creativity and critical thinking.This
was reinforced by the government’s effort to suppress all works of literature
through the destruction of books by burning.451° Fahrenheit was believed to represent the temperature at which books
would spontaneously ignite.

Today we face, if not the destruction of society around the
world, then at least the risk of radical changes ensuing from climate
change.The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC ) has recommended setting
the goal of limiting the increase in the average temperature of the atmosphere
to 2°C, but there is a moderate probability that the increase by mid-century
will in fact be rather higher – perhaps 4 to 6°C (7 to 10° Fahrenheit).

Such a temperature rise does not sound too
intolerable, but in fact it implies rather violent changes to our environment: more
violent tropical storms due to the increased energy available from the oceans, greater
loss of large areas of arable land to desertification or at least greatly
reduced fertility due to changing rainfall patterns, and also the exposure of
major population centers to the risk of flooding due to rising sea levels.Some areas will also benefit from increased
rainfall or extended growing seasons.

The means exist to mitigate at least one cause of this
increase in the world’s temperature – the emission of Greenhouse Gases – but it
is not clear in 2008 that the world’s major emitters will respond with sufficient
commitment and speed to achieve the necessary reductions in time.So it seems likely that during the 21 Century
the appearance of the world we have come to know over the last two millennia
will change quite dramatically.Ice
coverage will shrink, some fertile areas will decline, some unfertile areas
will become fertile, and some areas will be lost to inundation.The extent of this change depends to some
degree on whether the world’s developed populations will set aside their
fondness for energy-intensive lifestyles and devote some personal energy to
critical thinking about our own behaviors and about the policies of our
governments.

In Bradbury’s novel the protagonist, who is initially one
those in charge of book burning, experiences an epiphany and revolts.He flees from the city and discovers a
community whose members have memorized entire books and critical commentaries
and who pass this knowledge on to younger members in order to keep it alive.

So I wonder whether as individuals we should not begin to
memorize the land we occupy, so that even beyond the effects of climate change
we will have living knowledge of how it used to be.I am not thinking of academic documentaries,
valuable as these can be, but rather the personal knowledge of people who are
in touch with the world around them and who know some hectares of land “as well
as the backs of their hands”.Farmers, hikers,
naturalists, nature photographers, land owners, dog walkers, and joggers.There are still many people in our society
that have direct knowledge of the land around them.Could each of these millions become a “land
watcher” for some simple corner of our planet?

Should we, like Bradbury’s protagonist, begin to create a
living memory of how the world was before the storm ahead?